Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time review

Reviewed on: PS4

Crash Bandicoot 4, the fourth game in the crazy marsupial’s series, which had gone without games since Crash 3, back on the PS1, has finally arrived! Just like a wizard, Crash is never late nor early, but arrives precisely when he means to (just like this review). Right? At least that’s how they want you to look at things. Ignoring decades of new games, some of them quite cool, Activision releases, after a very successful remaster/remake of the original trilogy, a game whose purpose is to continue the franchise the way it should have continued: with a fun, hard platformer with lots of personality. And, aside from a few details, the goal was certainly achieved. During this review, I will consider Crash 4 as it was conceived: as the fourth game in the series. Even though I actually think Twinsanity is pretty cool. They could do a remaster of that one. I’d buy it.
Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time is the newest game in the series that was born from the minds of Naughty Dog back on the PlayStation 1. In case you don’t know who those guys are, these days they are busy developing games like Uncharted and The Last of Us. The responsibility of bringing Crash back falls to Toys For Bob, which recently remade the original trilogy of the little dragon Spyro. It’s a big responsibility, but they delivered a game that has all the spirit of the series.
Let’s get something out of the way right now: Crash 4 is a great game. Excellent, really. It’s a platformer, the famous “level-by-level game”, very well built, with responsive controls, fun and creative levels, and several different mechanics from one level to another. Not all levels will be played as Crash (or Coco, who has exactly the same abilities as Crash and can be chosen as the protagonist), and the other characters available, such as Pasadena or the formerly villainous Dingodile, have completely different gameplay styles and are a breath of fresh air between one main level and another.
The game has all the same features as the original trilogy. You basically need to get from the start to the end of the level, looking along the way for all the fruit crates, all the gems, and more collectibles and secrets hidden everywhere. For this, you can play in “modern” mode, in which you have an unlimited number of lives, or in “classic” mode, where you can die a limited number of times until being sent to the Game Over screen and having to restart the whole level from scratch. Honestly, there’s no reason not to choose “modern” mode, since it doesn’t make the game easier, as many challenges require you to reach the end of the level with 3 deaths or fewer, or sometimes even without dying a single time. But still, it’s nice to have difficulty customization options.
By the way, difficulty is an important and ever-present factor in the series. I’m not a great master of video games, but I finished Crash 1, 2 and 3 without major problems (though I didn’t get all the relics or anything, I was far from it). I can say that, in my opinion, Crash 4 is harder than the three previous games, and that is sometimes good and sometimes bad.
The good part is that, for series veterans like me, the game presents real challenges from the start. Even after finishing the game, you have A LOT to do, from hunting the secret colored gems, getting the infamous relics (finishing each level under a certain time), and earning the bizarrely hard “insanely perfect relics”, which require you to finish the whole level without dying a single time while collecting all the crates. And then repeat all that in the flipped mode, in which the levels are mirrored and with certain different visual effects. In other words, it’s a ton of content, and all at a difficulty that starts high and ends insane.
The bad part is that this ends up isolating less experienced players. I know someone who enjoys video games only sporadically, but who, having liked the recent (and excellent, mind you) Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled a lot, wanted to try playing Crash 4. But this person didn’t have the patience to even get past the fourth level. The game is really damn hard. And mind you, this person finished Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled completely on normal mode, which anyone who played it knows isn’t exactly the easiest thing to do. In other words, Crash 4 could start, in its first 5 or 6 levels, with easier things, to get used to those who never played the previous ones and introduce the mechanics without many difficulties.
The biggest problem, however, is that the game is quite frustrating at times. Crash 4 has many, but many indeed, crates hidden behind walls and obstacles that, because of the way the camera is positioned, are hidden from the player’s view. Practically every level has this. Which means that, after finally reaching the end of a super hard level and hunting for crates for more than an hour, you see that 501/502 crate marker and end up throwing your controller off the balcony. No matter how attentive you are and how able you are to reach the hardest crates, there’s always one missing that was hidden behind something, which makes you have to keep walking against every corner, wall and obstacle in the level, in a quite tedious way, hoping to find the damn thing by luck. That wouldn’t be a problem if the levels were short, as they are in Crash 1, 2 and 3, but here they are quite long, which makes the process quite frustrating.
As for the audiovisual side, honestly it’s even a bit boring to write about. Because everything is perfect. The game is beautiful, runs smooth as butter, the characters’ voices are excellent, the music is cool and fits the game… There’s nowhere to find fault. The visuals stand out, with vibrant colors and a cartoonish style that makes everything very fun. Besides that, the levels go from prehistory to the future, passing through pirate and ice age themes, all tied together by the time travel theme the game has.
All in all, Crash 4 is an excellent game, but one that can become a bit frustrating if you’re not an ace at video games. It’s a shame, because it could have been the perfect game to attract more people to the franchise, but after playing a few levels, many will end up giving up. I myself finished the game but didn’t have the patience to go back and collect the relics and everything else, but to me, personally, the difficulty was well balanced: the game was hard to finish but it was all really fun, and if I wanted to try going back to do all the extras, I know I’d have a tough road ahead, as it should be. But a game like this could be a bit more comprehensive, welcoming to beginners. For fans of the series like me and you, it’s probably the best game in the franchise, and certainly the one with the most content, by far, but for those who want to start with the Marsupial who was once practically the PlayStation mascot, it may be better to get the remastered trilogy, at least to get used to the difficulty.
Crash 4 is available for PS4 and Xbox. This review was based on the PS4 edition, played on a PS4 Pro.

SCORE: 9.0